Boy kitty had emergency exploratory abdominal surgery on Tuesday.
He’s back home now, though, and running around being a dink.
We still don’t know whether he’s got cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, or something else.
So now we’re $1500 lighter for this, plus the $300 or so to diagnose his cardiomyopathy a couple of a weeks ago. He’s a hurtin’ cowpoke, but hopefully it’s just inflammatory bowel.
Anyway, can anybody recommend a good veterinary insurance plan? What are the premiums and deductables like? Does it work like traditional homo sapiens medical insurance, or what?
We’ve told him that he should think of his now hairless belly as a “Brazilian,” but I don’t think he’s buying it.
I don’t know about the premiums and such (I’ve always gotten my vet care at deeply discounted employee prices), but pet insurance works roughly the way human insurance does if you have a provider who doesn’t file the forms for you.
We don’t file insurance forms for clients, at least not on the emergency side of things. The specialists might, I suppose. So you pay us, then we fill out a form for you that has date of treatment, price, diagnosis, etc. and you send it in and wait for reimbursement.
AFAIK, there are different plans you can choose from with different benefits and premiums. Some offer basic care like vaccines and heartworm prevention, others cover things like annual bloodwork, dental cleanings, etc. Still others may cover major elective surgeries like cruciate repairs and hip replacements.
Well with insurance, the idea is that you pay a small amount so that in the case of some relatively unlikely event happening you’ll get a big amount.
Your animal is already sick, so it’s kind of like trying to buy fire insurance on a house which is already on fire. No insurance company would sell you any. If they did they’d price it so high that you’d probably be better off just paying it yourself.
